EFSA’s Scientific Assessment Support (SAS) Unit has launched an open consultation on the Draft Guidance on Expert Knowledge Elicitation in Food and Feed Safety Risk Assessment http://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/consultations/call/130813.htm The document proposes a process to help the Authority access specialist knowledge on parameters for use in risk assessments when relevant information is not available in scientific literature or […]
Protecting the Cancer Susceptibility Curve. Why might the U.S. EPA and its stakeholders be spending so much effort refining allometric scaling procedures, dialing back the estimation of exposure to the maximally exposed individual, and positing sophisticated nonlinear modes of action, while continuing to make the unscientific assertion that we are all equally susceptible to carcinogenesis? I […]
A while ago EFSA produced a short video explaining what cumulative risk assessment is. This is a good idea: chemical mixtures are increasingly an issue of public concern, as awareness of the failure risk assessment process to take into account chemical mixtures becomes more widely known. I think there are questions about how well this […]
Comparing how interests are declared in Cochrane systematic reviews with the procedure employed by the European Food Safety Authority in its 2012 Opinion on Thresholds of Toxicological Concern. Recommendations on declarations of interest in the conduct of Cochrane reviews in medicine are comprehensive, covering not only financial conflicts of interest but also publishing histories and […]
Emma Davies at Chemical Watch has put together a nice piece summarising the thoughts of Lisa Bero, professor at the University of California San Francisco’s Department of Clinical Pharmacy Institute for Health Policy Studies (Chemical Watch, 27 June 2013). Bero recently published a paper (Krauth et al. 2013) examining various instruments used for assessing the quality of […]
I just heard from Patrice Sutton, one of the architects of the Navigation Guide, that a new study has been published ahead of print in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives (EHP) addressing the long-standing debate about how to assess weight of evidence for environmental chemicals and other hazards, and the use of animal evidence in […]
Critiquing lobbyists’ and special interest groups’ critical responses to scientific reviews and publications can be like shooting fish in a barrel. I only bother in cases when I get particularly ticked off by a critique because it is just so lazy in comparison to the document criticised and so comprehensively fails itself to meet the […]
The Politics of Bees Turns Science on its Head. A Forbes columnist turns his “skeptical eye” on the EU neonicotinoid pesticide ban, in a rather partial account of the interplay between the science and lobbying which has resulted in the decision. Beware the rise of the government scientists turned lobbyists. George Monbiot: What happens to people when […]
Something which came to my attention the other day (though it was published in February) is that EFSA has published a call for tender for “Scientific services to support EFSA systematic reviews in the field of plant health risk assessment”. For anyone not intimately familiar with the processes by which the European agencies procure services, […]
I have been looking forward to this for a long time: the publication of NTP / OHAT systematic review draft protocols for the association between BPA exposure and obesity, and PFOA/PFOS exposure and immunotoxicity. I am particularly interested in how they propose managing the different streams of evidence from toxicological research (a major difference between […]